Tag Archives: alcohol

Delegate Charles Barkley (D-39) has just given the most astounding interview by a member of General Assembly leadership ever seen by your author. In it, he broke the most important rule of Annapolis decorum there is: never throw your superiors under the bus.

The anti-brewery bill passed the House on a 139-0 vote. One source tells us, “When a bad bill passes on a vote like that, someone f____d up.” In an incredible interview with Maryland beer blog Naptown Pint, Barkley placed the blame on his superiors, specifically Economic Matters Committee Chair Dereck Davis and Speaker of the House Mike Busch. The whole interview is a massive scoop and a must-read, but the key passages are this:

“We didn’t know what was in the bill until the day it came in front of our committee for the vote,” Barkley answered. But was that due to the rush of the process, or was it an intentional screen being put up around the bill’s contents?

“I don’t think they were trying to give out too many details,” he commented…

“I honestly thought we were moving in the right direction with Nick Manis [MCA], Steve Wise [MSLBA legal counsel] and [Jack] Milani [MSLBA, Monaghan’s Pub in Baltimore]. We thought we were making progress, and we had the guys talking to us.”

Barkley then paused for a moment.

“All of a sudden, they quit talking to us,” he continued. “And then the [Economic Matters Committee] Chairman [Dereck E. Davis] said, ‘This is what we’re doing.’”…

I asked him his thoughts on some of the statements by House members who voted in favor of HB 1283 that they now know it was a bad bill or that they were misled on the contents ahead of the committee vote that pushed HB 1283 over to the Senate.

“I would say absolutely they were misled. [The House] thought we worked out a compromise and this was it. We hadn’t,” he stated.

“Up until this point, I ran the subcommittee and I kept my chairman [Davis] informed. But this one left my hands. I’ve never had this kind of intervention before, until this year. I thought [Manis, Wise and Milani] were meeting with us. But I think we were getting too close to stuff they didn’t want. So I think they met with the Speaker and got things changed.”

Here is a sub-committee chair describing a major bill as a backroom, secret deal involving lobbyists, a powerful committee chair and the Speaker in cahoots to deceive the full House membership. Your author has never seen a state legislator entrusted with leadership responsibility go on the record in this way before. It is an almost certain firing offense.

Craft breweries have been growing rapidly in Maryland and elsewhere, forever changing the beer business. Maryland scored a huge win a couple months ago when Diageo announced their intention to open a $50 million Guinness brewery in Baltimore County, creating a tourist attraction and dozens of jobs. Best of all, unlike many employers, Diageo is not asking for one thin dime of public subsidy to come to the state. But instead of welcoming the new facility with open arms, the House of Delegates reacted by making it harder for Diageo to do business here, as well as many other breweries in Maryland.

The debacle began when Diageo asked for a change in state law to allow them to sell 5,000 barrels of beer at a restaurant and tap room on the brewery site. (Maryland’s current limit of 500 barrels is by far the lowest in the nation; the second-lowest state, North Carolina, has a limit of 25,000 barrels.) Other brewers sought a limit of 4,000 barrels in on-site sales for their own operations and five different bills followed. HB 1283 was the one that passed the House of Delegates and did three main things.

It increased the on-site sales limit to 2,000 barrels. Breweries could apply to the Comptroller for permission to sell another 1,000 barrels on-site, but they would have to go through a distributor to do so. That means the brewery would have to brew its own beer, then turn it over to a distributor, then receive it back from that distributor and of course pay the distributor a fee for its service. Guess who ultimately pays that fee? That’s right, you the customer!

It established closing times for tap rooms of 9 PM during the week and 10 PM on weekends, down from local closing times ranging from midnight to 2 AM.

It limited tap room sales to beer brewed on-site only. This repeals a long-standing practice in which brewery tap rooms supplement their own products with contract beer brewed for them by other breweries. Such contract beer sales are major sources of revenue for some craft brewers and make tap rooms more attractive to customers.

One of the biggest opponents of liberalizing rules on craft breweries is the Maryland State Licensed Beverage Association, which represents restaurants and small alcohol retailers. The group is particularly influential in Annapolis as its PAC has contributed over $180,000 to state politicians since 2005. The association sees craft brewers as competition for its members. From a zero-sum perspective, every pint purchased in a brewery tap room is a pint not purchased in a restaurant or package store. But that view doesn’t recognize the synergies between these types of establishments as well as their differences. Diageo’s brewery has the potential to be a major tourist facility, bolstering the entire local economy. And if a consumer purchases a new product at the Diageo site and likes it, he or she will be motivated to buy that same product at restaurants and stores. That means more business for everyone.

Some brewers would prefer that HB 1283 simply die in the Senate because of the problems it would cause, but it’s not so simple. If the bill dies, the state’s current on-site sales limit of 500 barrels would stay in place. That could cause Diageo to cancel its project, costing Baltimore County a $50 million tourist attraction that other states would kill to get. Think of the impact that would have on the industry’s perception of Maryland. If we lose Diageo, what other major brewer would ever relocate here?

Maryland has a number of anti-competitive laws on alcohol, including the much-loathed prohibitions on sales in most grocery stores and Montgomery County’s dysfunctional liquor monopoly. The last thing we need is even more of these laws, especially if it causes us to lose a major employer and gives us a national black eye. HB 1283 must be fixed. Cheers to the State Senate if they can get it done.

Advocates for the existing Montgomery County’s liquor monopoly have acknowledged the needs for improvements in the Department of Liquor Control’s (DLC) operation and customer service. I thought it might be useful to the debate over the monopoly to post the DLC’s Improvement Action Plan and current status.

Click on the little arrow in the bottom right corner if it is too hard to read in your browser and it should pop up in a new tab. My thanks to Montgomery County for providing it to me. You can find more evaluation of the DLC on CountyStat.

First, let’s consider the nature of the county’s budget. It is not a static, zero-sum thing. Rather, it is a dynamic and growing thing that increases almost every year. The county deliberately sets property tax rates to increase collections at the rate of inflation (its charter limit) regularly. Income and energy tax collections rise with private-sector growth. State aid, mostly going towards public schools, has been rising. All of these factors have contributed to a steadily growing county budget.

The chart below shows a comparison of total county revenues, net income from the county’s Department of Liquor Control (DLC), and the rate of inflation in the Washington-Baltimore metro area from Fiscal Year 2004 through Fiscal Year 2016.

A few things stand out. First, total revenues grew in ten of these twelve years, with small declines occurring in 2010 and 2015. (Data for the latter year is still an estimate). Second, total revenue has been growing at an average rate (4.2% a year) that is almost double the rate of local price inflation (2.4%). Third, net income from the liquor monopoly is a tiny fraction of the county’s budget and has been largely stagnant. In 2004, liquor money was 0.74% of the county’s budget; in 2016, it is projected to be 0.47%. Part of this is because the county has begun issuing bonds against liquor profits and thus must pay debt service. But another part is that the monopoly is poorly managed. Over this period, the county saw an average annual revenue gain of $25 million from liquor and $140 million from other sources.

That means county revenues would still go up even without liquor monopoly money. There would be no need for cuts.

Comptroller Peter Franchot has proposed allowing the private sector to compete with the county’s Department of Liquor Control (DLC). What would happen to county revenues if that were to occur? That depends on how retailers, restaurants and consumers react. Let’s consider what would happen if DLC were well-managed, price competitive and truly focused on customers. Under this scenario, it might lose just 25% of its net income. Here’s how county revenues would have performed since 2004 if that were the case.

In the real world, the county’s total revenues grew by an average 4.2% a year. If DLC had lost 25% of its net income, the county’s total revenues would have grown by an average 4.1%. There would be almost no difference to the county’s bottom line.

Now let’s suppose that DLC loses 50% of its net income. Here’s how that scenario would have played out.

The county’s average annual total revenue growth changes from 4.2% to 3.9%. Again, not much difference.

Finally, let’s look at what would have happened had DLC net income disappeared entirely.

The county’s annual total revenue growth changes from 4.2% to 3.7%. The latter number is still 55% greater than the average rate of price inflation in the Washington-Baltimore area (2.4%). Furthermore, let’s keep in mind that this scenario would only occur if DLC were so awful that all of its customers fled. If that’s the case, why should DLC be protected by a monopoly at all? And the data above completely omits any extra revenue the county would earn from a revitalized private sector free of the monopoly that it calls “an Evil Empire.” Extra money from property taxes and income taxes could close some of this gap.

This discussion is not exclusively hypothetical. In July, the County Council passed a mid-year savings plan that trimmed $54 million from the budget it had passed only two months before. That amount is more than twice as much as the county earns from its liquor monopoly. Public education and public safety were not jeopardized. That’s because the overall budget provided for a $209 million increase from the prior year’s estimated revenue. County government continues to grow and no apocalypse has occurred.

Finally, consider this. There are more than three thousand counties in the United States. Very few of them have MoCo’s resources. All of them except us have figured out how to pay for their priorities and balance their budgets without needing a liquor monopoly. Are MoCo’s elected officials the only county leaders in the entire United States who can’t figure out how to live without one? I think not; I have seen them deal with much more serious budget problems effectively.

The county government doesn’t need its liquor money. So let’s End the Monopoly.

In his first false claim, Mr. Pagnucco claims that DLC’s operations increase costs for the consumer. Across all categories except special order beer, costs are 2-10 percent cheaper than neighboring jurisdictions.

This claim struck me as incredible, so I decided to do a sampling of wine prices at a Montgomery County Liquor Store and Total Wine in McLean, Virginia. I focused on comparatively affordable wines and picked out some first at the DLC store and others from Total Wine, and did not know the price of the wine at the other store when I selected it (i.e. no cherry picking).

The results are presented in the following table:

Among the 26 wines, DLC doesn’t carry seven–I checked with the cashier who searched the computer. Only one wine was cheaper at the DLC store and another at the same price, and these two bottles were on sale.

Looking only at the 12 wines currently offered at a discount at Montgomery DLC stores revealed that even their sales tend to be lousy deals. The discounted prices on these wines were an average of 21.9% higher than at Total Wine. When this same set of wines is not on sale, the difference rises to 44.0%.

Examining the larger basket of 19 wines available at both stores shows that regular prices in DLC stores average 36.4% higher that at Total Wine across the river. Put another way, it would cost you an extra $89.04 (plus tax) to buy them in Maryland.

If Gino Renne begins his argument for maintaining the status quo with an obvious, easily disproved falsehood, why should anyone believe anything else he or MCGEO has to say on the subject?